


Just Married

by tenderguns



Category: At Dead Of Night (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Ficlet, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Manipulative Relationship, POV Third Person Limited, Rose's POV, Wedding, fuck hugo hall all my homie's hate hugo hall, rose gets reverse baby-trapped and realises it AT HER OWN WEDDING??? ow, rose is pregnant with jimmy at her wedding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-21 10:53:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30020664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tenderguns/pseuds/tenderguns
Summary: We are gathered here today to witness the union in matrimony of Hugo Reginald Hall and Rosemary Dolores Jones.
Relationships: Hugo Hall/Rose Hall
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	Just Married

"I do."

The shabby chapel is ugly under harsh electric light. Rose swallows, trying to see the beauty in it, in the glare of it settling in Hugo's hair. Her husband, her new husband. _I am a wife now,_ she thinks. Being a wife and being a husband are two different things. She knew it when she promised herself to him. She knows what she is signing up for. The registrar's voice is a lilting Dorset hum at her side, muffled by the throb of her pulse in her ears. Rose doesn't care for the formalities. It is as distant as last rites in the ears of the desperately sick. _I am a wife now._

"You may now kiss the bride." And so Hugo does, lifting Rose's face to his as if preparing to eat her alive. All the women he has devoured, and she is the one he took for a wife. She smiles against his mouth. It will be better, now. She can make a husband of a wolf. 

He draws away, his face pulled into a tight, triumphant grin. He has her. The steel of his eyes says everything he won't, not here. She is his to have, forever. Rose sees him then, this man she will stand by till death parts them, and she realises what he has done. The mornings of waking up sick to her stomach, the new sore ripeness of her breasts, the excitement. She should have expected nothing less of her deviant suitor than this, his final slight of hand.

She is trapped, she knows it. And she knows she will never forgive herself.

He offers her his elbow, and she slips her arm through his, the smile faltering on her face. She catches the dangerous glint in his eyes and replaces it with a brighter one, conjures the expression of a perfect bride. He leads her back down the aisle. She is blind to the faces of her parents, of the few friends who have come to send her off into the distant, dark voyage of marriage from which she will never return. Rose clings to his arm to steady herself, and she knows it thrills him, how afraid she is. His child in her belly. This is going to kill her.

Outside, the photographer assembles them immediately for the pictures, shot after shot after shot, and Rose barely has enough time for sips of champagne, bites of cake and little tartlets, whatever Hugo coaxes into her.

Hugo, always there, immense by her side. He darkens her periphery, already clouded by January fog. She could run into it, flee under its cover, if she had the guts. But she doesn't. She stays, and lets him decide the pose for the final photograph.

"Smile, he says, grinning down at her with his arm around her, and the camera flash is as blinding as tears.

_In the single snapshot Jimmy finds, when he is a man and she is dead, his mother is grinning so wide she might split in two. Hugo is pressing a kiss into the cloudlike up-sweep of her hair. His arm is snaked around her waist, pulling her close to him. She is very young, and Jimmy is surprised at how beautiful she is. Hugo is older, but lean and taut, groomed, powerful. It is an image of love. Jimmy swallows hard. In the photos, Rose is holding her bouquet at her stomach, great white funereal lilies. He wonders when it went wrong for them. Surely not here. Surely not in this moment, where his mother is so painfully happy._

Hugo's arm tight around her waist, the pressure enough to hurt, but never enough to punish her the way she deserves, for this. The bouquet over her belly, over the brewing that is taking place in the foreign plain deep inside her. To hide her shame. 


End file.
